Low/High Cavitation Production Plastic Injection Molds

Single cavity tooling refers to molds that are designed to produce a single part per shot, whereas higher-cavitation tooling can be designed to create higher quantities of parts in a single cycle.

Single cavity plastic injection molds may have several advantages. If part volumes are low, it may be difficult to justify building additional cavities. If the tool is designed to produce very difficult parts with critical dimensions or tolerances, it is often beneficial to create a single cavity tool so the same precision manufacturing does not have to be duplicated and maintained multiple times. This is particularly true of surgical devices and other potentially low volume, high accuracy applications.

Qualification of multi-cavity plastic injection molds may be slightly more costly, and if problems arise within one of the cavities, the entire mold must be removed from the press for repair. Similarly, if product design changes commonly occur on a mold, multi-cavity tooling may be less attractive. The major advantages of higher cavitation are increased capacity, better efficiency, faster turn-around times, and lower part prices, as more parts are produced in the same cycle time.